FabriVLA: A Lightweight Vision-Language-Action Model with Conformal Action Chunk Uncertainty

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a leading paradigm for general purpose robotic manipulation, but their computational cost and limited uncertainty awareness hinder practical deployment. We present FabriVLA, a lightweight VLA that fuses shallow and intermediate VLM layers to preserve fine-grained visual features, and gates self-attention among action tokens so that its flow matching head admits inter step structure only as far as training warrants. Trained end-to-end in a single stage, FabriVLA reaches a state-of-the-art 90.0% average success on Meta-World MT50 with only 0.88B parameters. We further introduce Joint Conformal Action Chunk Calibration (JCAC), a post-training method that augments a frozen policy with a lightweight residual scale head. From a single policy query, JCAC turns a learned elementwise error scale into a set that covers the whole executed action prefix at a user chosen confidence level, 3.3× tighter in mean radius than an unconditional conformal set. On LIBERO-Safety, these bounds rank rollouts by risk before execution, supporting risk ranked review. Together, FabriVLA and JCAC provide a lightweight and auditable framework for multi-task manipulation with calibrated action uncertainty.